The Fat Angel Sings

Another band making serious strides in broadening the appeal of their chosen genres. Puerto Rican frontwoman, Anynda Segarra, was thrust into her career when she ran away from home at 17 and started busking to survive on the streets while studying the works of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie and Woody Guthrie.

In her latest album release, she formed the character, Navita (Latin for Navigator), who she says, “[has grown] up in a city that’s like New York, who’s a street kid, like me when I was little, that has a special place in the history of her people.” Segarra spent her late teens jumping from train-to-train, moving from the South Bronx all the way down to New Orleans.

Released in May this year, The Navigator has arrived at a time in American history when it’s most needed. While Trump spruiks fear around the country and boasts about increasing security on the Mexico-US border, Segarra loudly protests in ‘Rican Beach’, “Now all the politicians, they just flap their mouths / they say we’ll build a wall to keep them out.”

She recently put on the second edition of Nosotros Festival at New York’s Lincoln Centre, an arts event for Latinx expression and protest. “I just had enough with the dehumanization of immigrant people. I felt like, ‘I can’t do this; I can’t hear this anymore,’” she said of organising the festival to Remezcla. “I spent so much of my life running from my Latinx identity.”

Now, she’s taught herself everything she can about her Puerto Rican history and her music combines elements of traditional American folk protest songs, while implanting roots to her heritage with Afro-Caribbean percussion and empowering storytelling that tackles displacement, diaspora and racism to attempt to push back against fear mongering. Segarra is no longer running.